The modern world has so many distractions in it, it’s absurd. I’ve outlined four below. Get stuck on these and watch your life shrivel up and your time vanish:

1.) Television

Television is the biggest thief of time.

Binge watching The Office or Futurama can be entertaining. But it’s also vapid, empty, and brings nothing real to your life.

Sure, talking about the goofball prank Jim pulls or the gruesome murder in AHS can lead to conversation. But, let’s not forget, it’s conversation about the over-the-top actions of fictional characters, contrived through a written plot.

Real, deep conversation is about the actions and thoughts you have when you aren’t numbing your mind with the idiot box.

2.) Smart phones

God bless the smartphone. It has enabled us to do so much.

You can keep in contact with the most important people in your life constantly.

You can research anything at all and have answers on moments.

You can take top quality photos and videos anywhere, anytime.

You can create amazing blog posts, like this one, comfortably and easily.

Truly, they have the potential to better our lives.

They also:

Distract our driving

Tempt with pornography

Increase impulse buying

Kill conversations and relationships through discussion

Increases temptations to infidelity

Take up all of our time with games and apps

The cons are so great, the distractions so real and vapid, that, more than television ever could, they have become the opiate of the masses.

Use the thing like a real man. If you can’t, then chuck it in the nearby lake and get a flip phone.

3.) Inane conversation

From the great Sage Francis:

I see dead people, but who doesn’t?We walk undercover, deadpan blending in with other human puppets,

Discussing nothing but the sports and weather,

If I stare long enough they all morph together.

Brilliantly put. Everywhere I turn, people are spouting meaningless conversations about sports or weather.

Who cares?

If I don’t know you, we don’t need to speak.

If we do, make it something that matters. Do not highjack my ears to prattle about the goddamned Oakland Raiders. I could care less what a bunch of prancing millionaires do while playing a game with one another.

That said, I’d love to talk to, say, John Madden. He’s made his entire life about sports and has met and seen fascinating people and things. He’s going to have amazing stories and be able to speak to life through his art.

But the average Joe on the street who uses sports to avoid life?

Hard pass.

4.) Pornography and Masturbation

One of the biggest tools being used to keep boys from becoming men of power and conviction is pornography and masturbation.

The self-proclaimed sex experts even act like it’s normal.

It’s not.

Having sex is normal.

It makes you feel energetic. Strong. Like you’re more of a man. You can practically feel the testosterone flood your body afterwards.

None of those things are true after masturbation.

You’re just another basement-dwelling loser who needs more sunlight.

I talked to a 20 year old boy the other day with ED issues. After a few minutes, the problem became clear: he’d spent so much time fucking himself to models he didn’t find real girls appealing anymore.

Even knowing the problem didn’t help though. He went right home and did the same, sad thing he always does.

Don’t do this to yourself.

Be a man and have the fortitude to say no to your right hand when it’s feeling frisky.

Note: the word Feminist is used frequently in this article and refers specifically to the Fourth Wave. While earlier waves focused on equal treatment and opportunity, the Fourth Wave is much more interested in equal outcome, which is not realistic for reasons touched on below. They have many important points regarding violence against women that have merit, but their insistence on equal outcome is oppressive both to males and those females whose goals, views, and beliefs deviate from their own.

Women are superior to men.

That’s the message that the Feminist would have you believe.

Before telling you that men run everything in our society or that the dreaded Patriarchy works overtime to actively oppress and destroy young women everywhere it finds them.

That message is repeated over and over again in television, books, and floods at us over social media constantly.

The why isn’t difficult to understand. Women look at the top: the political leaders, the tremendously wealthy, the Nobel laureates – and saw they were mostly men.

This is true.

But their next conclusion was that this means men run the world.

That’s where their argument falls apart.

The bell curve

The statistical world can be reflected in the famous bell curve.

This curve, as represented in the image, puts most people in the middle.

This curve is reflected in all things throughout nature, though it can vary quite a bit.

The average is always the largest portion and appears in the middle sections of the curve.

The major differences happen on the edges.

The left side is the group at the bottom of whatever we are measuring. If we look at height, these are the unusually short people and includes little people. Those on the right side of the chart are the unusually tall people and includes our NBA players.

It’s on these curves that things get really interesting.

But before we delve deeper into the two outer edges, let’s establish something with a handful of simple numbers. Let’s say we’ve rated two groups of people on physical attractiveness:

2, 3, 10

5, 5, 5

These sets look nothing alike. One has two people almost at the bottom and one at the very top.

The other has three very average people.

The average overall rating of both groups is 5, but only a fool would claim they’re equal. The very ugly and very attractive person in the first group make it much more visible.

The point: outliers, those outside the middle of the curve, can skew perception very hard.

Men at the top

One of the fascinating things about statistics measuring success between males and females: women have a larger middle curve, men have much longer ends.

Meaning, when we look at salaries, example, we see a lot more male billionaires than female.

In IQ, we see many more genius level males than females.

In jobs, men tend to occupy many more of the top jobs in the country.

As a Feminist, it would be easy to assume that the system must be skewed against them.

But, before you jump to that conclusion, you have to first look down.

Men at the bottom

At the bottom, men also have a larger share.

Men are much more likely to be imprisoned, the Federal Bureau of Prisons reports that 93.2% of its inmates are males.

67.5% of the homeless in this country are male.

In the United States, 77.8% of murder victims are male.

Men also constitute 93% of deaths in the workplace, nearly 11 times higher than the rate for females.

In contravention to “common knowledge,” a fascinating study in 2014 found that while women felt pressured into sex more often, its studied population of students showed almost no difference in the rate of males vs. females coerced into having sex by force, drug, or alcohol use.

It would be easy for a man to look at the bottom and conclude that society is organized to favor women.

But, like the assumption above, if we look at bother top and bottom together, we realize that’s nonsense.

More realistically speaking, men and women are roughly equal, with minor variation, at most tasks and innate abilities. There is, however, a greater number of men bunched around the top and bottom.

The reason we have a lack of equal results is, in part, due to this disparity, however, the most telling factor may be motivation.

Motivational gaps

Why do more men work dangerous jobs than women?

If all things were equal except risk – same hours, same pay, same level of difficulty – would men still choose the careers that increase the odds of death, like mining, military service, over-the-road trucking, etc.

Only a fool would say yes.

So why choose difficult careers?

Men (when we look at entry-level workers) also tend to work far greater hours, negotiate their raises more frequently and fervently, and identify more with their employer.

Interestingly, at the top positions, those differences disappear.

These two examples point to the real underlying issue: one of motivation.

Men and women are different. We evolved differently to meet different needs. Those who pretend we are exactly the same, or that claim upbringing is the sole determining factor, ignore a great deal of evidence from the field of biological evolution.

Men are motivated more by money. They are more likely to take on greater risks and work greater hours to accomplish their goals.

That’s a general statement, not true across the board. As mentioned above, women who work in boardrooms are virtually identical, in terms of their willingness to take risks, fight for raises, work long hours, etc. as their male counterparts.

Meaning that a woman interested in making it in business or some other male dominated field should be happily considered and accepted if she has the qualifications. She has the right to motivations for the job on question.

Equality of acceptance is ideal. Equality of outcomes is unrealistic. Forcing women to take positions in society they are not interested in is oppression, regardless of how it might fit the Feminist agenda.

Countless examples exist to support this theory of differences in motivation and prevailing, modern social science literature does as well.

The idea that there is a conspiratorial Patriarchy is improbable when we look at the bottom rungs of society. Few would seek to claim the the Patriarchy is working to make men’s lives worse is bizarre at best.

We’ll touch on this in the future but why do you think men and women differ in these ways?

Without it, he at best becomes yet another overweight man-child doing nothing remotely productive with himself, at worst, he becomes a criminal or male apologist.

Terrible fates.

Cell Phone Codependency

It’s easier than ever before to waste your time. When I was a kid, you had to work to find distractions, unless you were lucky enough to have a television in your room or your parents loaded up one of the thousands of America Online discs that came to your house every month.

These devices give us incredible use. We can research anything, learn anything, build anything.

Or we can dive headlong into the narcissist’s platforms: Facebook and Instagram.

These sites are just communication tools and platforms used with friends and family. But, all too often when you open these apps, what you see is ” look at me look at me” nonsense post Desperately (with a capital D) seeking attention. Or girls who always seem to include cleavage in their pictures to get your like or your attention.

How many hours are wasted to get vapid, empty responses from people on social media?

Everybody seems to think they’re a celebrity.

But, that time. That attention. It’s getting so you can’t even drive without people busily texting their friends about nonsense that can wait. Or, worse yet: those people that think they deserve your immediate response and get mad when they don’t have it.

No. My phone is a tool for me.

Not a tool for you to have my immediate, constant attention.

Your life purpose, unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg, is not on Facebook. You will not find happiness there. If you need proof to that, just look at all the depressed kids on Tumblr.

If you want to use your phone to build something, research something, where do something productive with your life that’s fine. I write all of these posts on my phone. But, do yourself a favor: go into your notification settings and turn off all social media notifications. You don’t need them immediately. They will still be there when you want to look at them.

Maybe you’ll even find the time to see the people around you. Your friends and family. In person, where they can appreciate you.

Personal attention from someone who doesn’t have a phone in their face is increasingly rare and to be valued.

I want my children to remember me, my face. Not my eyes occasionally darting up from behind a Samsung logo.

And you certainly don’t want to get sucked into six hours of porno or games a day.

Finding Purpose

So what is your purpose?

That can be anything. Anything that you can devote yourself to that will better your life. That will better the world around you.

If you’re handy build something. If you’re artistic paint something. If you are a good communicator volunteer with children.

Whatever you decide to do – don’t wait for permission. You don’t need it. When you do something self-driven, for yourself, for others, you don’t ask the world for permission to do it. You give that to yourself.

As in other posts: wake up early. Exercise. And then find that time, at the beginning of the day, where you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to. No excuses. No bullshit.

Until you do this, for yourself, your life will continue to feel empty.

There is a massive difference between doing something at someone else’s command and taking the power for yourself.

This culture is a Barren Wasteland. They’ll push you to watch porn, or play some stupid game, or do whatever their wife or girlfriend tell them to. Like the average person. But the average person is miserable.

The culture today does not care for men. They hammer us over the head relentlessly with images of terrifying “toxic masculinity.” They highlight some undisciplined losers and tell us “#yesallmen.” Every societal fault is a man’s fault, from the ravages of poverty to unwanted pregnancy.

The hell of it is that it works.

We have a wave of male apologists who rush on social media or the news to agree that half the world’s population, themselves included, is trash.

No.

That’s reductionist nonsense.

Feminist waves

There was a wave of feminism that fought for equal rights – not to claim that men and women are equal in every regard, we are physiologically and psychologically different – but for equal protection under the law. These were the original Bad Bitches. They stood up to a society that didn’t give a shit and fought until they were heard and things gradually improved. I.E. women’s suffrage.

That is a much different and more sympathetic group of feminists than the Feminists you see all too frequently today.

You know the group: the kind that want to masculanize women and feminize men. The kind that will lay an argument that men are responsible for all unwanted pregnancies because their sexual organs are more readily capable of causing pregnancy from a calendrical standpoint (never mind the tens of thousands of ejaculations a man has that fail to impregnate anyone. Or that gay men impregnate one another 0% of the time) – turning the entire issue into some sort of poorly thought out algebra problem and robbing it of any philosophical standing. The type who would blame every single man for every single injustice committed in Western Civilization, alienating the millions of us who actually care about gender equality.

I’m not angry at them, no really, they’re expressing their upset with flaws in our culture, but I don’t understand their tactics.

To be honest, beyond having their posts go viral or their books hit the bestsellers list, I’m not sure they understand themselves either.

Yes, the extreme right is absurd. It isn’t wrong to yearn for traditional family values, especially when the far left is turning the culture into an idiotic wasteland of used up, unhappy drones, but actively relegating women, minorities, and homosexuals to second class citizen status isn’t right.

To my mind the feminist and racial equality movements were about engendering choice. If a woman wishes to be a construction worker and has the emotional and physical wherewithal to do it, let her. But, if a woman wishes to marry, raise her family, and honor her husband, she should be free to choose that without being the subject of scorn, pity, or derision.

The wave of Feminists that look down on the housewife belittle and remove choice as greatly as any misogynist.

“Toxicness”

Masculinity isn’t toxic. Being a piece of shit is. A man is responsible, takes care of the people and things he cares most about, honors his relationships, and lives by a code.

Warren Buffett is a man.

Harvey Weinstein is a piece of shit.

See the difference?

It isn’t their gender, as they are both male.

The difference is found in their life philosophies.

Buffett sought to create a world that the people he cares about most could thrive in, while simultaneously insuring they have a reason to pursue their own successes. He does this with his business, lifestyle, and politics. He honors his wife and children. The world is a better place for

We have yet to hear a single horror story of Buffett harassing or groping anyone. And we never will.

Weinstein had part of equation. He had a creative vision for the world. But his abuse of power in pursuit of his jollies make him a piece of shit.

Not because he’s a male though. Because he gives into his weaknesses and transfers it to others through forceful behavior.

To distill my argument to its most basic elements: don’t judge someone by their gender, judge them by whether they’re an asshole or not.

Pornography, masturbation, and self-caused orgasm are the biggest problems in your life.

I know you don’t want to hear that.

The culture doesn’t want you to believe it. They foist this crap like it’s going out of style. As though it were somehow healthy.

Yeah, spending half an hour at a time hunting down the perfect, unrealistic “moment” of two (or more) other people having sex (an act that they debase by taking money for screwing), diddling yourself that whole time, and popping a lonely one off sounds real healthy.

Lost energy

Do you really think this is a manly act? Or healthy?

The amount of energy expended is enormous. You’ve felt that lazy wave that washes over your body afterwards. All your plans for the day discarded and blown, ironically enough.

Not a lot of people follow up their session with a good run.

No.

It’s deadening.

It turns energy into nothing.

Just a depressing puddle of wasted life force.

The hell of it is that sexual energy is among a man’s most potent.

Transmuting that energy into your daily life will result in greater confidence, energy, focus, sharpness. You’ll find yourself more comfortable talking to girls and just being a goddamn man.